Don't Blame It On Me, The UN's Legal Immunity 1: A United States judge has ruled that the United Nations is immune from a lawsuit seeking compensation for victims of the deadly #cholera outbreak that left more than 8,000 people dead in #Haiti.

The lawsuit had been filed by human rights groups and others, contending that the #UN had not screened the peacekeepers from #Nepal for the disease that also sickened more than 700,000 since the first case was detected in October 2010.

But US District Judge J. Paul Oetken ruled last week Friday that the UN’s charter provides broad legal immunity and that the international body has not waived it. Cholera was brought to Haiti by #Nepalese soldiers quartered in a United Nations peacekeeping camp that spilled its waste into a tributary of the Artibonite. Investigations have pointed strongly to leaking sewage at a camp for #UN soldiers from Nepal, where cholera is endemic, as the origin of the outbreak in Haiti.

No cases of the bacterial infection, which causes diarrhea, #nausea, #vomiting and muscle cramps, had been recorded in #Haiti for a century until the outbreak in late 2010. Haiti, which was the first country in the world to ever buy itself out of slavery (from France), is today the least developed nation in the Americas.

It ranks 168th on the Human Development Index, narrowly beating Afghanistan but falling behind Syria and Sudan.

The Justice Department has twice filed statements of interest with the court, arguing against the suit at a hearing last year, claiming that the #UN needed immunity to complete its global mission, and letting the case continue would subject the international body to many more #lawsuits from around the #world.

The United States was not named in the suit, but federal prosecutors said they got involved because the US is the UN's host nation.

The UN has repeatedly declined to comment on the lawsuit but has said it is working with the government in Haiti to eradicate #cholera. The United Nations is facing an unprecedented legal and moral challenge after evidence that a cholera outbreak in Haiti may have originated at one of its bases.

More than 8,000 Haitians have died of cholera in the past two years. Now scientific research is backing the theory that the source of the outbreak was a UN base in Mirebalais.

Daniele Lantagne, an environmental engineer at Tufts University and one of the UN-appointed researchers who matched the Haitian cholera strain with that of the outbreak in Nepal, is concerned that while the contagion rate has slowed in recent years, the country risks a second round of mass contagion while the international health focus is turned to Ebola.

The current calm in deaths caused by cholera might be explained by partial #immunity, which occurs when a #disease is rampant, she told FRANCE 24. That period of respite, she said, will last for two to three years. “After that, however,… there could be another surge.”

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